Re: [emacs-bidi] missing fonts for bidi Emacs on cygwin

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Kenichi,

On 2011/10/11 11:27, Kenichi Handa wrote:
> In article<address@hidden>, "Martin J. Dürst"<address@hidden>  writes:
>
> > In the meantime, I have added all the Cygwin font packages that I
> > possibly could. The situation improved. Arabic letters are now shown, in
> > the right RTL order. But they are not connected. Hindi (i.e. Devanagari)
> > seems to have similar problems.
>
> On Cygwin, perhaps you must install m17n-lib, etc.  Please
> see the section "* Complex Text Layout support libraries" in
> the file INSTALL.

I installed m17n-db, m17n-lib, and libotf, as indicated in the INSTALL 
file. I also installed intlfonts, afterwards. But that didn't help. 
Maybe I should have installed intlfonts before?

There are several details in INSTALL that could make things easier:

- Mention additional distribution files upfront. In particular people 
who are not very good at English will read it slowly, and proceed as 
they read the file.

- If possible, integrate these various packages with Emacs itself. There 
may be copyright problems to not have things in the same repository, but 
I don't see a problem with making them external libraries in the 
repository so that they get downloaded automatically, and automating the 
make process. If we say "Emacs does complex scripts." and "Emacs does 
bidi.", then that should be the default, not some "additional 
distribution files" option.

- For m17n-db, m17n-lib, and libotf, mention that they should be 
installed in that order. Currently, it looks like they are independent, 
which they aren't.

- The section on intlfonts says "If you see a non-ASCII character appear 
as a hollow box...". These days, characters with missing glyphs are 
displayed as a box with a number, so the text should be adapted here, I 
guess.

> > On the other hand, these work fine in the Windows version. The only
> > problem that I found in the Windows version is that U+30FC (Katakana
> > length mark) doesn't show (it's just a box with the number 30FC), even
> > though the rest of Japanese works well.
>
> That's is a known problem.  Does the situation change when
> you do C-x RET L Japanese RET?

No, sorry, it didn't change.

For the record, I have to say that I'm very pleased with how far Emacs 
has come with respect to Unicode, bidi, and related stuff!

Regards,  Martin.